Brief Bio

Kyu-Young Whang graduated (Summa Cum Laude) from Seoul National University in 1973 and received the M.S. degrees from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1975, and Stanford University in 1982. He earned the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1984. From 1983 to 1991, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. In 1990, he joined KAIST, where he currently is a KAIST Distinguished Professor and a professor emeritus at School of Computing. He is also affiliated with Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) as a Visiting Chair Professor since 2016. He established and led Advanced Information Technology Research Center (AITrc), an engineering center of excellence (ERC) supported by National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, as the director from 1999 to 2016. His research interests encompass database systems/storage systems, object-oriented databases, geographic information systems (GIS), data mining/data warehouses, XML databases, search engines, and big data management platforms and analytics.

Dr. Whang served as an IEEE Distinguished Visitor from 1989 to 1990, received the Best Paper Award from the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) in 1990, served the ICDE seven times as a program co-chair or vice chair from 1989 to 2006, and served program committees of over 110 international conferences including VLDB and ACM SIGMOD. He was the program chair (Asia and Pacific Rim) for COOPIS'98, the program chair (Asia, Pacific, and Australia) for VLDB 2000, and a program co-chair of ICDE2006. He was the general chair of VLDB2006, PAKDD 2003, and DASFAA 2004. He twice received the External Honor Recognition from IBM. Dr. Whang served as an Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal from 2003-2009 (Coordinating EIC from 2007-2009) after serving the editorial board as a founding member for thirteen years. He was an associate editor of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin from 1990 to 1993, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal from 1991 to 1995, Int'l J. of GIS from 1994 to 2007, and IEEE TKDE from 2002 to 2006. He is on the editorial boards of the WWW Journal. He was a trustee of the VLDB Endowment from 1998 to 2004 and from 2010 to 2016 (reelected). He served as Chair, Vice Chair, Advisor, and the Awards Chair of the steering committee of DASFAA. He is a steering committee member of the IEEE ICDE, PAKDD, APWeb, and ADMA Conferences. He served the IEEE Computer Society Asia/Pacific Activities Group as the Korean representative from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of IFIP WG 2.6 from 1994 to 2012. He served the data engineering community as the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering from 2003 to 2005. Dr. Whang received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award (2014) for his contributions to the promotion of database research world-wide, and PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award (2014), and DASFAA Outstanding Contributions Award (2011) for his contributions to database and data mining research in the Asia-Pacific region. He is the recipient of the prestigious (Presidential) Korea Engineering Award (2012) and (Presidential) Korean Supreme Scientist/Engineer Award (2017).